Somerset Holidays and Short Breaks by Coach
Somerset is cider country: orchards along the Tone valley, cheese maturing in the Mendip caves, a gorge cut more than four hundred feet into the limestone, and a cathedral city you can walk across in ten minutes. Our tours here are based on the coast at Weston-super-Mare, with Bath, Wells and Bristol close enough for comfortable day excursions.
Everything travels by private coach with a driver, so nobody has to tackle the lanes around Cheddar. Breakfast and evening meals are included, and most departures set aside a number of single rooms with no supplement. Ask us which apply to the date you are looking at.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Somerset Tours
Most of our Somerset holidays are based at the Royal Grosvenor Hotel in Weston-super-Mare, on the coast and within reach of Cheddar, Wells and Bath. The Bristol-based art and city tours stay at the Mercure Bristol North, The Grange. Tours run four or five days, so three or four nights in one hotel with no packing and repacking. Breakfast and evening meals are included throughout.
More than a purely scenic tour, less than a walking holiday. Bath and Bristol are covered on guided walks over pavement and some hills, Cheddar Gorge involves standing and strolling rather than climbing, and the show caves have steps, uneven floors and low sections. There is always the option of staying with the coach or finding a bench. If you have concerns about a particular excursion, ask us and we will tell you honestly what it involves.
Yes. Any of these itineraries can be run as a Private Group for a club, society or group of friends, with the whole coach to yourselves. The prices shown are worked out on a full coach, so the figure for a smaller party will differ. Tell us roughly how many of you there are and the time of year you have in mind, and we will quote.
Cheese, Cider and the Somerset Larder
Cheddar is a village at the foot of the Mendips before it is a cheese, and only one producer still makes the cheese in the place it is named after. Our food and drink tours call there, and at Sheppy's near Taunton, where the same family has been pressing cider apples for generations and the orchards run right up to the farm buildings.
At Burrow Hill you will find Somerset Cider Brandy, distilled in copper stills from cider made on the farm and aged in oak — the first British cider brandy made commercially in a very long time. Tastings are part of the visit rather than an afterthought, and the producers themselves usually do the talking.
Cheddar Gorge and the show caves at Wookey Hole sit within a few miles of all of it, which is why a food tour here tends to end up being a landscape tour as well.
Bath, Bristol and the Coast
Bath and Bristol lie just over Somerset's modern boundary, but they belong to the same limestone country and both are an easy run from Weston-super-Mare. At the Roman Baths the water still rises hot from the spring, as it has done since long before the Romans built over it; above ground the Georgian terraces are honey-coloured Bath stone quarried a few miles away.
Bristol is a different proposition — Brunel's SS Great Britain in her dry dock, the Museum & Art Gallery, the Arnolfini on the harbourside, and street art that has become an attraction in its own right. Our Bristol tours include a guided walk that covers both the city's seafaring past and its Banksy walls.
Weston-super-Mare itself has a long sandy beach, a Grand Pier rebuilt after fire, and one of the greatest tidal ranges in the world, which means the sea can look a very long way off.
